The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
September 16, 2007

Holy Cross Day (transferred)
Isaiah 45:21-25
Philippians 2:5-11
John 12:31-36a


The day before yesterday, September 14, was Holy Cross Day, or, as it used to be called by its more elegant, high-church name, “The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.”

It is a feast long observed to commemorate what was believed to be the cross on which Jesus died. The cross was discovered in the 4th-century – as the result of a miracle, it was said. Later it fell into the hands of the Persians, and in the 7th century the Church recovered it once again.

But whatever the story of the wooden cross on which Jesus died, whether it is fact or legend, we remember the Holy Cross today, not as a commemoration of that 4th-century discovery, but as a celebration of the exaltation of Jesus upon a cross. It is our patronal feast day. And what better patronal feast for a parish whose name is “Our Saviour” than a feast which honors the actual cross of Jesus – God’s pivotal act in history, the mystery of God in the world, the mystery of the Cross and the empty tomb and their assurance of life in the midst of death? We are gathered at God’s table today, as always, not because we value a wooden relic, but because we share a common faith in Jesus, a faith in the One whom, because of the life he brings by virtue of the Cross, we acknowledge as both Savior and Lord.

A cross has not always been seen as a sign of victory, a sign of life. Before Jesus died on the Cross, when Jesus was trying to explain just what kind of death was in store for him, both the crowds and the disciples objected. “We have heard from the law and from our tradition that the Messiah remains forever, so we don’t ‘get it,’ Jesus. We don’t understand what you’re telling us. If the Messiah remains forever, how can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?” In other words, if, as we’ve been taught, the Christ is to come to lead and restore the people of God, then how can can it be that he will die a common and humiliating death on a cross, an end befitting only a criminal?

The disciples failed to understand what the Cross is all about, as we fail to understand what it’s all about. Our attention on the ways of man, our focus on wars and rumors of wars, on chariots and tanks and missiles and bombs, on markets and business and worldly fashions and worldly success, we fail to see the ways of God. We fail to engage the Cross as part of the deep mystery of death and life.

A different perspective might help. That’s what Dr. W. B. J Martin suggested in a sermon I heard over forty years ago, a sermon he called “Justification by Faith and a Sense of Humor.” Dr. Martin said that it was a different perspective – which is the basis of a sense of humor – that led Martin Luther to be turned upside down theologically. As a young man, Luther had focused on good works as the way to salvation. But then he studied the Scriptures. “The just shall live by faith,” he read. But he didn’t get the joke right away. He had to take a journey first.

As a young monk Luther was scrupulous about good works, about doing all the things a Christian, and especially a good monk, was supposed to do. Good works, Luther believed, was the way to God’s heart. “If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery,” Luther later said, “it was I.”

One of the good works Luther undertook was the pilgrimage to Rome expected of every monk, and one day, while there, he found himself climbing the steps of St. Peter’s on his knees. On each step he said the prescribed prayers and then bent to kiss the step, until, according to the story, about half way up, Luther recalled the punch line – “The just shall live by faith.” – and he stood up, bent backwards, and shook with a great belly laugh. He laughed at the absurdity of it all. Not at the ritual and the prayers themselves, but at the absurdity of what he had believed about God for so long, which had led him to undertake the prescribed rites with such fear, believing that if he forgot a prayer or missed a step, God was sure to be displeased.

He laughed at the absurdity of a Church that insisted that God was more interested in a man’s posture on the steps of St. Peter’s than in the man’s heart and his trust in God. Luther laughed at himself, at the absurdity of his own belief that such works, rather than his faith in Christ, would put him right with God. “All this time the joke has been on me,” he laughed. “All this time I’ve been thinking that it’s all about me, this experience we call life. All this time I’ve been thinking that my salvation depends upon what I do, when actually it’s all about what God does, about God and his grace, about my faith in God’s promise.”

And with just such a laugh at himself, Luther exchanged justification by works for justification by faith, and so turned his world, and ours, on its ear.

During my first semester in seminary, just such a change in perspective happened to me. It was at an occasion as solemn to us at Nashotah House as Luther’s pilgrimage to Rome was to him. It was at a solemn high mass, a mass done the way only Nashotah House can do the mass – “bells and smells,” it’s called – with bells and candles in every corner of the church and music worthy of angels and incense so thick you could hardly see the altar, not just the piddling amount we use here. It was the kind of mass I love. We were there to do things “decently and in order,” with great solemnity and dignity, the way only high-church Anglicans can do things.

The first half of the mass moved along according to expectations. But at the offertory, two of my classmates were bringing the elements for the Eucharist to the altar, and they tripped on the steps and, with a great crash, they dropped them. On the floor! Communion bread rolling all over the place, wine and water everywhere!

Well, the sacristans, those seniors who were the seminary altar guild, were beside themselves! The solemnity of the mass had been ruined by the carelessness of mortal flesh. They were sure that God himself was greatly displeased, and they saw the whole episode as further evidence that holy things should never be entrusted to lowly juniors. But the sacristans quickly mobilized and began picking up all the bread and cleaning up the wine and water, while the rest of us mere mortals covered their tracks by singing the offertory hymn a second time through, the organist just playing on and on and on until, at last, we were ready to resume and do things right.

That Eucharist made an impression on me, such an impression, in fact, that I later suggested to the Dean that we ought to do the offertory that way at every Eucharist, because it was a better image of the pitiful way we human beings gracelessly bring our real offerings to God all the time, the offerings of our lives.

The Dean didn’t buy it. He thought my suggestion a joke, so we continued with the “decently and in order” routine. But I still think that, like Luther on the steps St. Peter’s, that misstep and the scrambling sacristans at the offertory offer a more accurate perspective on the truth, a more realistic image of who we really are – inept creatures who constantly fret over our own importance rather than offering our best, poor as it is, and then resting in the mystery of God and of God’s generous gifts and promises.

Isn’t that the way it was with the disciples and crowds around Jesus? If ever they were to see God in the Jesus who was on his way to Calvary, they certainly would need a change of perspective. Because they, too, were so preoccupied, as we are preoccupied, with their own limited vision of life and the world that they were blinded, as we are blinded, to the supreme irony of God, the irony of God’s way of dealing with his fallen creation. They were blinded, as we are blinded, to the love and truth who was standing in flesh and blood before their very eyes, blinded to the truth of the one who was about to ascend a cross so that they could see and experience God’s love for themselves.

The joke was on them, as the joke is on us. The disciples could not understand, as we do not understand, how Almighty God should foolishly condescend himself to become one of us, and die on a cross, in order that he might rescue us all by showing us in his own flesh and blood that truth which divine love is.

“What is man,” we ask with the psalmist, ”that God should be mindful of him?” Who are we that God himself should be concerned for us and care what happens to us? We are insignificant little beings who inhabit an insignificant little planet that floats around the edge of an insignificant little galaxy somewhere in the midst of an infinite universe. So who are we that God should give a hoot, and offer us a way out?

Who are we that God should become a mortal man in order to offer us a way to appreciate the joke, that mystery that God wishes to share with us -- that God loves the world so much that he himself assumes our flesh, and becomes one of us, and makes himself nothing, and takes on the very nature and form of a slave, and humbles himself, and becomes so humble a servant to his own creation that he even gives up his own life to show us the love he created the world for? In other words, to save us.

It just doesn’t make sense. To us, it’s like a bad ending to a bad book. It’s like an author who writes a murder mystery but who can’t find a way to solve the mystery, so after three or four hundred pages he has the detective go on vacation half way around the world, where he stumbles on the murder weapon and a written confession in a bottle that has miraculously floated up on a distant beach.

A mystery where the case is solved at the end by something that unexpectedly appears at the last moment, rather than being wrapped up as the result of the good work of the detective, is a bad story. Like a bad joke, it is flat. It offers, literally, an unbelievable story. Good stories just don’t happen like that. And books like that are dismissed by the critics.

And in just such a way, says C. S. Lewis in his little book Miracles, and for just such a reason, many people dismiss God. They ask with the psalmist, but without the psalmist’s spiritual perspective, “Who are we, little snits floating insignificantly in infinite space, that we should be rescued at the last hour by a miracle? Who are we that we should be pulled out of the pit we’ve dug for ourselves, pulled out at the last minute by God dying on a cross clothed as a man?”

And Lewis agrees – if the story is about us. If the story is about us, it would be a bad story, a flat, uninteresting story, even an unbelievable story, a story unworthy of an ordinary writer, much less worthy of a creative God.

But what if....? What if the joke is on us? Lewis asks. What if all this time we’ve been asking the wrong question? What if we’re looking at the facts from the wrong perspective? What if the story – the story that began with Creation and continues with all the clumsy ways in which men and women live our lives and turn paradise into hell on earth – is not about us? What if the main question of the story is not “What is man?” but “Who is God?”

What if the main characters of the story are not human beings who float about on a planet in space and get themselves into trouble so that they need to be rescued by some miraculous and absurd method at the last minute? What if the main character of the story is not us, but God? What if the main focus is about what God is like – about how the main thing about God is that God is eternal self-giving, eternal love? What if the story is primarily a divine story, a spiritual story, not a human story? What if the story is not a detective story at all, but a love story, a story about how, from beginning to end, from Creation to Judgment and at every moment in between, God is love, undiluted, creative love?

What if it is a story about how God created the world in love, and about how God loves the world he has created so much that he is always, unceasingly, giving himself to the world from the instant of creation right on into eternity? And what if, as Teilhard de Chardin insists, what if we in this mortal world ”are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience?”

What if the joke is on us? What if the main question of the story is not “Who are we that the Creator of the world should give a hoot?” but “Who is God that we should praise him?” If we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience, a human experience which God has created for us spiritual beings, then, says Lewis, if that is the perspective, it is a very good story indeed, because it’s really a story about the unfolding of the internal nature of the main character, who acts on Calvary no differently than he acted in Creation and in every moment all along the way.

Human beings and our sin are all part of the story, of course, but the main focus of the story is not our sin, but our spiritual lives and the possibility of our love, God’s life and ours, God’s love and ours, God’s grace and our faith. It is a story about how that love and grace sustain us at every turn of our existence, not how God pulls us out of the abyss at the last minute. The main point, the punch line of all this experience of existence we call life, is spiritual, not human. The main point of the story is about how God’s creative love is eternal, about how God’s love is always and everywhere faithfully offered, from Creation to Judgment, no matter how far out into eternity we flee or how far into absurdity we fall, even when we find ourselves having that human experience we call death, so that the Cross is but the final and ultimate sign which shows us what God is like for all eternity.

Is that what the story is all about? If so, then what can we possibly do but what we’re doing right now? What can we possibly do but offer an answering love and, drawing near to the Cross and to each other, bow the knee at the name of Jesus, and with great praise confess with every tongue that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father?

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?